Marie Curie Quotes

One of our joys was to go into our workroom at night; we then perceived on all sides the feebly luminous silhouettes of the bottles or capsules containing our products. It was really a lovely sight and one always new to us. The glowing tubes looked like faint, fairy lights.
Marie Curie

The first experiments on the biological properties of radium were successfully made in France with samples from our laboratory, while my husband was living. The results were, at once, encouraging, so that the new branch of medical science, called radiumtherapy (in France, Curietherapy), developed rapidly, first in France and later in other countries.
Marie Curie

It may be easily understood how deeply I appreciated the privilege of realizing that our discovery had become a benefit to mankind, not only through its great scientific importance, but also by its power of efficient action against human suffering and terrible disease. This was indeed a splendid reward for our years of hard toil.
Marie Curie

In 1903 I finished my doctor's thesis and obtained the degree. At the end of the same year the Nobel prize was awarded jointly to Becquerel, my husband and me for the discovery of radioactivity and new radioactive elements. This event greatly increased the publicity of our work. For some time there was no more peace. Visitors and demands for lectures and articles interrupted every day....
Marie Curie

I have already explained how indispensable was our freedom from external distraction, in order to maintain our family life and our scientific activity. Of course, people who contribute to that kind of trouble generally mean it kindly. It is only that they do not realize the conditions of the problem.
Marie Curie

In 1906 just as we were definitely giving up the old shed laboratory where we had been so happy, there came the dreadful catastrophe which took my husband away from me and left me alone to bring up our children and, at the same time, to continue our work of research.
Marie Curie

It is impossible for me to express the profoundness and importance of the crisis brought into my life by the loss of the one who had been my closest companion and best friend. Crushed by the blow, I did not feel able to face the future. I could not forget, however, what my husband used sometimes to say, that, even deprived of him, I ought to continue my work.
Marie Curie

I am working in the laboratory all day long, it is all I can do; I am better off there than anywhere else. I conceive of nothing any more that could give me personal joy, except perhaps scientific work–and even there, no, because if I succeeded with it, I would not endure you not to know it.
Marie Curie

It is well known that the X-rays offer surgeons and doctors extremely useful means for the examination of the sick and wounded....
Marie Curie

The numerous new hospitals that were established all over France in the first months of the war had, as a rule, no installation for the use of X-rays. To meet this need I first gathered together all the apparatus I could find in the laboratories and stores. With this equipment I established in August and September, 1914, several stations of radiology, the operation of which was assured by volunteer helpers to whom I gave instruction.
Marie Curie

X rays had had only a limited usefulness up to the time of the war. The great catastrophe which was let loose upon humanity, accumulating its victims in terrifying numbers, brought up by reaction the ardent desire to save everything that could be saved and to exploit every means of sparing and protecting human life.
Marie Curie

At once there appeared an effort to make the X ray yield its maximum of service. What had seemed difficult became easy and received an immediate solution. The material and the personnel were multiplied as if by enchantment. All those who did not understand gave in or accepted; those who did not know learned; those who had been indifferent became devoted. Thus the scientific discovery achieved the conquest of its natural field of action. A similar evolution took place in radium therapy, or the medical application of radiations emitted by the radio elements.
Marie Curie

What are we to conclude from this unhoped-for development shared between the new radiations revealed to us by science at the end of the nineteenth century? It seems that they must make our confidence in disinterested research more alive and increase our reverence and admiration for it.
Marie Curie

[During WWI] We need great courage and I hope we will not lack it. We must keep the firm hope that after these bad days, good times will return.
Marie Curie

I’m bewildered by the life I’m leading and incapable of telling you anything intelligent. I ask myself, what fundamental vice is there in the organization of humanity that makes this sort of agitation, to a certain degree, necessary?
Marie Curie

What’s undeniable is the sincerity of everyone who does these things and their conviction that they are necessary.
Marie Curie

Here I’m in a magnificent apartment, bedroom, sitting-room and bathroom, overlooking the river bordered by hills, and full of flowers they gave me at the train station—mostly roses since it’s their season. Unfortunately it’s gray, and I’m afraid it will rain....
Marie Curie

[On her husband Pierre] Every good subject brings him pleasure, but in this domain he expects to have priority…
Marie Curie

The sensitive plate, the gas which is ionised, the fluorescent screen, are in reality receivers, into another kind of energy, chemical energy, ionic energy… luminous energy.
Marie Curie

We sleep sometimes at night and sometimes by day, we dance, and we run to such follies that sometimes we deserve to be locked up in an asylum for the insane.
Marie Curie

I have fallen into black melancholy… our daily companions are dreadful west winds, with embellishments of rain, flood and mud… my existence strangely resembles that of one of those slugs which haunt the dirty water of our river.
Marie Curie

I was barely eighteen when I came here, and what I have not been through! There have been moments which I shall certainly count among the most cruel of my life… I feel everything very violently, with a physical violence, and then I give myself a shaking, the vigor of my nature conquers and it seems to me that I am coming out of my nightmare… There is… the new of new impressions; the need of chance, of movement and life, which seizes me sometimes with such force that I want to fling myself into the greatest of follies.
Marie Curie

[On religious comments about her sister giving birth to a dead child] The more I recognize how lucky they are the less I can understand their faith, and the less I feel capable of sharing their happiness.
Marie Curie

So far as I am concerned, I should never voluntarily contribute toward anybody’s loss of faith. Let everybody keep his own faith, so long as it is sincere. Only hypocrisy irritates me – and it is as widespread as true faith is rare… I hate hypocrisy. But I respect sincere religious feelings when I meet them, even if they go with a limited state of mind…
Marie Curie

If radioactive substance is placed in the dark in the vicinity of the closed eye or the temple, a sensation of light fills the eye.
Marie Curie

I had grown so accustomed to the idea of the child that I am absolutely desperate and cannot be consoled.
Marie Curie

Dust, the air in the room, and one’s clothes, all become radioactive. The air in the room is a conductor… We can no longer have any apparatus completely isolated.
Marie Curie

Radium compounds appear to change with the lapse of time, doubtless under the action of their own radiation.
Marie Curie

[To her sister who had just given birth to a dead child] What suffering ti must be for a mother to go through so many trials for nothing!
Marie Curie

The various reasons we have enumerated lead us to believe that the new radioactive substance contains a new element to which we propose to give the name of Radium. The new radioactive substance certainly contains a very strong proportion of barium; in spite of that its radioactivity is considerable. The radioactivity of radium therefore must be enormous.
Marie Curie

[On her early students] To try to teach them is truly to build on sand, because when they learn one thing they have already forgotten what one taught them the day before. At times this is a sort of torture.
Marie Curie

[When being a governess early on before she could study] It seems to be that I don’t require a great deal to be content: I only want to get the conviction that I am being of some use…
Marie Curie

[On Hela having her engagement broken] Nobody is asking them for anything. But why do they off end by troubling the peace of an innocent creature?
Marie Curie

My plans for the future are modest indeed: my dream, for the moment, is to have a corner of my own where I can live with my father.
Marie Curie

To get my independence again, and a place to live, I would give half my life.
Marie Curie

If Casimir Dluski once called my student years ‘the heroic years of my sister in law’s life,’ I may say without exaggeration that this period was, for my husband and myself, the heroic period of our common existence. …And yet it was in this miserable shed that the best and happiest years of our life were spent, entirely consecrated to work. I sometimes pass the whole day stirring a mass in ebullition, with an iron rod nearly as big as myself. In the evening I was broken with fatigue.
Marie Curie

I came to treat as many as twenty kilograms of matter at a time, which had the effect of filling the shed with great jars full of precipitates and liquids. It was killing work to carry the receivers, to pour off the liquids and to stir, for hours at a stretch, the boiling matter in a smelting basin.
Marie Curie